Voyage Of The Damned
(Xmas Special, Dr 10, 25/12/2007, producer/showrunner: Russell T Davies, writer: Russell T Davies, director: James Strong)
Rank: 309
'Santa baby come trim my Christmas Tree, Just skip this story when
you leave me Dr Who series three, Thinking of all the fun I missed, Without
proper Dr Who and just watching David Tennant and Kylie Minogue kiss, Has there
ever been such a wretched story as this?’
This is a disaster. Not just a disaster movie, but a disaster. Proof that even the greats can have bad days, this story is Russell T Davies’ take on ‘The Poseidon Adventure’, with half-remembered bits of ‘Titanic’ thrown in. Not the most obvious source for the third Christmas story of the modern era, but all becomes clear when you learn two things about the showrunner: that he spent a particularly miserable first Christmas away from home in 1981 snowed in unable to see his family or all his exciting new friends, with a telly that had a busted aerial and only a recently bought VHS of ‘The Poseidon Adventure’ for company and that he had a decade later, as a junior TV executive, worked with Kate Winslet before she was big on his 1991 children’s series ‘Dark Seasons’ and then reportedly failed to get her for ‘Dr Who’ (we don’t actually know if she snubbed him or couldn’t remember him or was just too busy). Stuck for ideas for a third Christmas story now that robot Santas and killer Christmas trees had been used up (and with regular Christmas stories never a part of his original pitch for the series), Russell figures disaster movies are always on over the Christmas holidays and sticks both memories together, an ‘I’ll-show-you’ big budget rendering of ‘The Titanic’ film that made Winslet a star, only in space with even more exotic special effects that only Dr Who could do. So we have a Doctor, spending Christmas all on his own far from home, watching disasters unfold and being powerless to do much about them, written with a slight frisson of ‘look see, what I can do!’ For this is the start, not only of the 10th Dr’s messiah complex but Russell’s, as he uses his own folklore as the series’, understandable given that deadlines are tight this year – tighter than usual given how long season three took to come together, so Russell only has three weeks to write this story. It feels like a first draft this one before the ideas have quite coalesced together, with characters written in broad strokes before the details to fill them in that allows Russell as a writer to get away with that by making us care for them, which makes this story feel like a Christmas crossword puzzle with the pieces slotting in the right order rather than a proper living breathing story. It’s also uncharacteristically unoriginal for a Russell T story, with practically every idea ‘borrowed’ from somewhere else (there’s a third vaguely remembered source, Dr Who’s own ‘Enlightenment’ from 1983 with sailing ships in space, though oddly enough Russell professed ignorance of an even more obvious Dr Whoy source: Douglas Adams’ computer game ‘Starship Titanic’, a sort of interactive version of this story, only with parrots standing in for the robo-angels). In other words, it’s a story that makes a lot of sense when you know where its coming from in the author’s past, but makes very little sense of the audience. In time Russell will see what he’s doing and make amends in the best way, with a run of fourth series stories taking himself and his character to task for this messiah complexes, but we’re not there yet: instead this is a writer as dangerously close to clock-watching hack work as an inspired author like Russell ever came, leaning back and relying on Dr Who clichés to get him out of trouble while he does the bare bones necessary to cover a script.
It’s worse than just being uninspired though.
There’s a fundamental flaw at the heart of this story (well, a couple of them
given the casting of Kate Winslet’s ‘replacement’ Kylie Minogue) that ‘Voyage
Of the Damned’ never quite escapes, a metaphorical iceberg that drives such a
big hole in the size of this story it lets too much water in for any of the
good ideas to float. Disaster movies work in a very different way to the rules
of Dr Who. In them we see how small mankind really is when set against nature,
what a great social leveller it is and how everyone suffers equally when things
go wrong no matter how rich or poor they are (that’s surely where the ‘Titanic’
setting came from, as while it isn’t a ‘disaster’ movie in the same sense as
‘The Poseidon Adventure’ it’s very much a tale of the upper classes getting too
big for their boots and thinking they can defeat the seas of the Atlantic and
learning nothing by then letting the rich into the lifeboats over the poor).
The excitement of watching disaster movies is of trying to work which person
will randomly snuff it before the end credits and whose going to survive
against the odds, while there are no morals, no greater life lessons beyond the
awesome speed at which things can get out of control fast. Dr Who isn’t like
that. Dr Who is a series where karma rewards goodness and punishes bad, where
the Doctor is the cavalry who will fight against the natural random pattern of
events to put things right where he can. The joy in Dr Who is in seeing justice
done, of a sort, and weeping on the few occasions where the series is brave
enough to see the sacrifice of someone we really care about. It isn’t about
wondering about who will make it to the end credits, it’s the relief of seeing
the right people survive to get the life they need at the end. The single most
un-Dr Who scene the whole story is when the Dr’s stood around awkwardly making conversation
with Mr Copper and giving him the happy ending – because he has to give it to
someone and all the truly deserving people have died. Everyone here is just so
eager to give their lives up to save one another and be heroic– statistically I
guess we have to meet this many nice people somewhere but it seems implausible
to say the least and very out of kilter for how Dr Who usually works. Even the
confusing and very un-Dr Whoy title of the episode points at this: these people
are all damned, and that’s not generally how Dr Who works, he’s a doctor – he
saves people, no one’s condemned to death on his watch, even when things seem
hopeless. Russell tries to explain that in one of the final scenes, as Mr Copper
says to the Doctor that toff git Rickston Slade isn’t the one who deserved to
live and how he’s learnt absolutely nothing from this experience, but the
Doctor can’t decide who survives ‘because that would make you a monster’. But
it doesn’t: that’s the rule of disaster movies yes, but not Dr Who. Removing
that choice doesn’t make him a monster, it makes him a doctor. Taking that
element away at any time in Dr Who seems odd and cruel, but to do that at
Christmas? Bah humbug to you too – the effect leaves you as mournful and
joyless as Russell must have felt all those years ago when he’d seen ‘The
Poseidon Adventure’ through three or four times in lieu of the usual
heartwarming Christmas fare. It’s all wrong. I can see why Russell did it and
in another standalone episode playing against the rules might have worked (it
does in this story’s opposite ‘Midnight’), but we come to this series for joy
and optimism and to have that taken away in a story so minor feels like being
given a stocking full of coal or a burnt turkey. We’ve waited all year for a
day when the real world and all its lessons of random cruelty stayed away, just
give us this one, please.
Taking that element of Dr Whoyness away makes this a
story that relies more than ever on Russell’s ability to write sharp insightful
believable lovable characters that we only get to know for one adventure – and
that doesn’t happen here, mostly you suspect because those tight deadlines mean
that Russell hasn’t lived with these characters the way he usually does, so
they’re caricatures rather than people who live and breathe. There are untold
examples of first drafts of other Who scripts where Russell planned to kill one
or more of his characters off for a big dramatic finale – and then found he
couldn’t, that he’d grown too close to them. It’s notable that he doesn’t that
here, perhaps because these are his most uninteresting bunch of characters so
far: Max Capricorn is as obvious a generic evil baddy as any he ever wrote for
despite the belated attempts to make him a sympathetic cyborg, Mr Copper is as
obvious a ‘mad professor’ type as they come (even though he’s officially a sort
of twisted historian), Bannakafalatta meant to be sweet and alieny-exotic and
not a lot more and his trick of saying his name every few seconds undoes all
that cuteness really quickly, there’s Froon and Morvin who are meant to be a
cute cosy couple but are just so moronic you want to shove them onto the
nearest lifeboat and then there’s Astrid, someone we’re obviously meant to feel
is sweet but is very very annoying, The last new ‘companion’ type Russell wrote
for (given that Donna was returning the following series), she doesn’t have any
distinguishing characteristics other than being poor and pretty – and Kylie’s
pretty poor at doing that.
It could still have worked – had, say, Kate Winslet
changed her mind and asked to return to her biggest role in a scifi setting.
But no: Will Baker, manager for Australian actress and pop star Kylie Minogue conventiently
‘bumped’ into Russell T Davies at a party and mentioned that his client was a
huge fan of his work, particularly Dr Who and would he be interested in her
appearing in the series? At a time when Russell was maybe feeling vulnerable
(when exactly did Kate Winslet turn him down?), here was a glorious boost to
his ego and with Will’s words ringing in his years (not the first time a
larger-than-life Baker had dictated what happened in a Dr Who script!) he ended
up writing this story specifically for her – the only time he wrote a Dr Who
part for an actual actor and it shows (Kylie plays Astrid as a sort of lower
class Charlene from ‘Neighbours’). While it was true as far as it goes (Kylie
seems to have found the experience a delight all round) you can’t help but
wonder if this was less about the series and more about Kylie’s comeback. This
is the era when she’d retired for a couple of years following a breast cancer
scare and wanted to ease her way back into her career. Sensibly she chose not
to go on a full-length gruelling tour, but without a means to promote new
product didn’t want to just record music either. What she really wanted was a
return to her acting roots before she happened to fall into a music career,
with a ready made series with a big family audience – and what better model for
that could there be for what she wanted to do than Billie Piper, rehabilitated
from teenage pop star to serious actress thanks to two years in Dr Who? Kylie
had after all had a hit with a song called ‘Two Hearts’: that’s practically
method acting. What could possibly go wrong? Russell was happy – he spent most of the
writing of this episode doubting they’d ever land a star that big and joking
that he agreed more to get to meet her than any hope for the series, David
Tennant was even happier (his only request for this story was the scene where
he got to kiss her), another Christmas slot that was becoming tricky was filled
for another year (its notable how un-Christmassy Russell’s next two festive
stories are, ‘Planet Of the Dead’ and ‘The End Of Time’) everyone making this
was happy, with a solution that killed several turkeys with one casting. That
the audience should be so lucky though. Lucky lucky lucky. Everyone involved in
this story seems to have stars in their eyes, which blinded them to the fact
that Kylie is no Billie Piper: she can’t convey the nuances of a layered
Russell T Davies script, even one with far less layers than normal, and I’d go
so far as to say that she might be the single worst actor we’d had in the
series to date (till Maisie Williams as Ashildr and Gia Re as Vilma come along
anyway). The script asks very little of her but she can’t even deliver that
properly: Astrid is simpering, gooey-eyed and bland, even when she’s meant to
be heroic and adventurous. Thank goodness she didn’t become a full-time
companion; this show would have been off the air again quicker than you could
say ‘Michael Grade’. Her exaggerated death scene (because Kylie wasn’t going to
spend a year in Cardff filming Dr Who now she had the stamina to return to a
world tour) is one of the single most
wretched scenes in all of Dr Who. Not just Astrid’s fall in slow mo, which is
presented us as an Adric-level bit of mournfulness that hasn’t been earned
aross multiple stories of getting to know someone, but the way the Dr is
carried on high by robo-angels, Murray Gold choirs singing, arms outstretched,
as if he’s important enough to ‘save’ but no one else in this world is. If ever
a scene of Dr Who was classified as smug and self-satisfied it’s that one,
drawing on cheap emotion that just isn’t there – and that’s all the worse for
coming in a story that’s about how, when things go wrong, everyone suffers good
or bad. And even that’s topped by the last holographic conversation they have (when
the Doctor briefly brings Astrid back again) and the horrifically cheesy line
‘You’re not falling Astrid, you’re flying!’ Mind you, the Doctor’s forgotten
how to flirt this whole episode: you can’t help but watch it and feel that
Russell is trying to copy what Steven Moffat did with ‘The Girl In The
Fireplace’ and make this an actual scifi-romance, but he’s not that kind of a
writer, despite having written the series ‘Cassanova’ . The 10th
Doctor just turns into a gauche awkward teenager and even David Tennant can’t
deliver some of these lines convincingly.
Those robo angels, too, are not a bad idea. Why did
aliens give the robots of this ship wings and a halo? Why not just make them
robots or, you know, give them flippers to go with the underwaterboat theme. Of
all the Christmas trappings we get in festive episodes this detail feels the
most like the writer looked around their room for ideas, looked trough some old
Christmas cards and went ‘yeah., that’ll do’. Russell needed somebody that
could fly to get the Dr out of trouble at the end, but what’s wrong with a
Robin? That would be far more in keeping with the ‘half-understood’ Christmas
theme of the ship. They don’t feel as if they belong on board this ship:
they’re a sleek design while it’s all rust and barnacles, they’re a curiously
accurate representation of Christmas cards for a culture that doesn’t
understand Earth. And they serve an all too deliberate plot function, telling
the Doctor all he needs to know at the beginning and saving his life at the
end.
It wouldn’t matter if we cared for the characters we
meet along the way, but we don’t. It wouldn’t matter if they were well acted,
but they aren’t. Geoffrey Palmer, in his third Dr Who appearance (and first in
over thirty years) is a safe pair of hands but he barely survices the opening
credits and Russell Tovey, while not yet a star, is clearly about to be (one of
the stranger revelations of Russell’s correspondence-turned-book ‘A Writer’s
Tale’ about the making of his era of Dr Who is just how gooey-eyed Russell went
over his namesake, doodling Midshipman Frame drawings all over the script;
Russell T once nominated Tovey as the actor he would have at least asked to
take over from David Tennant had he stayed on another year).The trouble is
they’re stuck in the captain’s cabin, piloting the ship, so we barely get to
see them. It’s the passengers we’re lumbered with and they’re all annoying. Mr
Copper is fun on paper, another of Russell’s occasional digs at people who are
all book learning and no experience, the way the first Romana was presented to
us in her first stories, a travelling salesman who lies and cheats his way into
a job so he can see the world – but then they cast Clive Swift making his
second Dr Who appearance (and first in twenty years) and working with him
sounds like a miserable experience all round (there’s an infamous interview in
Dr Who Magazine where he basically tells the reporter to get lost and stop
asking him questions, while castigating fans for caring about a TV show as if
its important, when he did it purely to take the money and run. So much for Jobel,
his narcissistic Dalek collaborator in ‘Revelation Of the Daleks’, being actin).
He can be good in other stuff but he’s phoning this performance in and clearly doesn’t understand a
word. Foon and Morvin are meant to be earn our sympathy, the Kate Winslet and
Leo De Caprio os the Starship Titanic, but they’re just too broad to like,
working class stereotypes that seem borderline offensive from the same writer
who grounded Rose and her mum in such aspirational penniless realism. Jimmy Vee
is usually reliable, but it’s hard to play subtle when you’re painted red and
covered in giant spikes and repeating your name everytime you talk and his
death scene is horrifically overplayed compared to everyone else’s in Dr Who
bare Astrid’s. Worse yet, the story’s so bland and boring, all so bitty with a
collection of set pieces of things happening to characters one after the other
with no flow. Worse even than that practically every scene feels emotionally
manipulative in a way that Dr Who had never been before, with Russell’s usual steady
hand at the tiller shaking from too much Christmas eggnog, the start of a decay
and self-indulgence that, mercifully, never quite arrives.
Russell’s too good a writer to completely lose his
touch though and there are some great little moments littered across this
script, moments when his usual inspiration suddenly kicks in. The idea of Earth
as a ‘level five planet’, being visited without our knowledge, is very Dr Who,
copying an idea from ‘Delta and the Bannermen’ but one that has a lot more
mileage in it. The best scene in the story is the very Dr Whoy ‘ordinary
hitting extraordinary’ one of Astrid being deliriously excited to be on her
first alien planet, laughing and giggling at the sheer joy of space travel –
even though to us it’s a typical run-down London high street. The idea of
aliens who don’t quite get what’s going on also adds to the occasional Dr Who
theme of multiculturalism, of seeing our own customs and traditions through
alien eyes and seeing how daft a lot of them are in isolation – particularly at
Christmas. Anyone whose ever had a friend from outside Europe/The Americas
round and asked why we have trees in the living room, cards on the wall,
mistletoe on the ceiling and stockings at the end of our beds will know the
feeling of having to sit down and actually explain something so ingrained into
our yearly rituals that we haven’t stopped to think about the reasons behind
them in years. A lot of society, al sociteies, is based around things humans
have attached importance to long ago, the weight of which we still carry – that
all fits in nicely with the overall theme in Dr Who that the past, present and
future are all connected because people impact other people. In that context it
makes sense they’d get a very famous Australian involved in this: I mean, their
Christmas days are at the height of Summer, with completely different trappings
to most of the audience watching this at home with the fire on because it’s
cold outside.
Mr Copper has some great lines (poorly delivered)
that are full of the misunderstandings that crop up when you’re trying to learn
about a new culture or even a historical period for the first time and make
lots of guesses: according to his research Christmas celebrates a baddy named
Santa with giant claws when we went to war with Turkey. Best line: ‘Proceed
with extreme caution – any minute now they start boxing!’, an even smarter line
than it sounds in context as ‘Boxing Day’ is the day in Britain when servants
get presents, having spent all of Christmas Day looking after their lords and
masters (second best line: Froon – ‘I like these buffalos from earth. They have
so many wings!’)These explanations makes more sense than the reality: that Christmas
is a Christian spin-off of paganism, a festival celebrating having survived
halfway through the darkness of Winter that then got hijacked as a religious
holiday even though it almost certainly wasn’t the birthday of someone who very
probably didn’t exist. Next they’ll be explaining why we have chocolate eggs at
Easter. It’s all too plausible too, in our day of early AI, that alien tech
would scan Earth and conclude that as ‘Titanic’ is the most talked about boat
on Earth it’s the perfect name for a starship, without understanding the
context of why its an incredibly bad idea full of symbolism and doom. What with
Bernard Cribbins making a first appearance as Wilf (not that we know who he is
yet) it’s a real shame we don’t get more of that story, of aliens turning up on
our world and pointing out all the things that are daft about this world we
live in and trying to go about unnoticed on Earth. Instead everyone gets zapped
back on board a disintegrating ship instead and that story’s boring.
There’s one thing, too, that could have made even
this story as written work. This is the last Christmas before the credit crunch
and the biggest recession in Britain at least for decades; a writer as smart as
Russell T Davies could feel it in the air (not least because TV series tend to
be where budgets are tightened first, before anyone else sees the bigger
picture of what’s going on). He could have made a comment about the recklessness
of bankers making lives worse for hard working people through greed and
stupidity. He thinks about it, almost does, then shies away from it. There are
lots of hints in this story about the dangers of privilege, of capitalists who left to their own devices put innocent
people in danger. Throughout we think Max Capricorn is going to be a big
character, we keep getting flashes of his Elon Musk-style smile and the
penny-pinching problems that happen with the Starship Titanic are all his. It
makes sense someone that heartless should end up a cyborg that doesn’t have
one. Had there been a ‘Titanic’ style scene of the posh people shoving the
steerage customers and staff out of the lifebelts, this story could yet have
made a powerful point: especially at Christmas, a time that should be for
everyone but tends to be aimed at the rich more than most. The recent plight of
the ‘Titan’ exploration sub, a millionaire wasting the lives of other millionaires
because he short-changed the safety measures needed to keep people safe to make
a bit extra money, shows how much a story like this one, of how money blinds
men to their faults, still resonates across the ages, but this isn’t that story.
There’s a speech that borrows heavily from a conspiracy theory about the
Titanic, that it was deliberately destroyed basically as a salvage job, with
rescue ships waiting just out of sight
to save everyone, as a way for the big bosses at Olympic which owned the ship
to collect their pensions. Only a miscommunication meant that the ships didn’t
get there on time. Though probably not true, its one of those stories that
seems just enough like the truth to have gone down as a sort of folk memory of
events and its that which Russell T draws on here: too many good people die
because the rich want to get richer, while ordinary people who’ve saved all
their lives for a trip of a lifetime are doomed because somebody wanted to
retire in luxury. However that plotpoint never quite rises to the surface,
bogged down as we are by the flotsam and jetsom of the rest of the plot It’s that
disaster movie ethos that gets in the way: against the tradition of all Dr Who
stories Max Capricorn gets away with it because he’s technically dead anyway.
Worse than that, he doesn’t learn anything. Not does the next nearest baddy,
rich twat Rickston Slade. He doesn’t create a memorial to the people who lost
their lives, he doesn’t agree to mend his ways, he doesn’t beg forgiveness for
his ignorance and affluence and waste, he just strides off to cause problems
again and the Doctor doesn’t stop him. He’s torn complete empires down for
less. Morvin gets to make the comment that finding out his wife Froon spent all
his money on phonelines, ringing up competitions to get a ticket and might as
well have bought right out, ‘hardly matters’ now they’re fighting for their
lives is the heart of this story, but it’s a line that’s wasted, forgotten
hidden in between the snogging and the explosions.
There’s another thing I have real issue with too:
the Doctor fusses over whether the Starship Titanic will crash into Buckingham
palace and rings the Queen up to warn her. Quite aside from the fact that she
always spent her holidays in Sandringham anyway, ringing up a posh old bint in
a pricey hat that could solve Britain’s economic woes at a stroke to warn her,
as if she’s more important than her subjects, might well be the single most
uncharacteristic thing the Doctor ever does (legend has it the Queen used to
spend her Christmasses watching telly and once ordered the series one box set
with the 9th Dr which might be why Russell T’s not quite as rude as
he might be – even so its another case of him believing his own publicity and
getting his own messiah complex now he’s making in-jokes in case the Queen’s
watching with surely half an eye on a knighthood. Not that he doesn’t deserve
one: if anyone’s boosted Britain’s reputation the past twenty off years its
Russell T). The Queen is the problem though, she’s why we get capitalists like
Max Capricon thinking they can fast-track shoddy spaceships in return for
prestige and honours, this story should be distancing itself from her, not
fawning. In this of all stories it’s an uncomfortable place to put that joke. The
result is a story with the very real message toned down to fit in all the
tinsel, an iceberg that’s had its sharp edges taken away so that it lands with
all the impact of a snowball. And Dr Who should be better than that.
Maybe, though, the biggest reason this story falls
is because what we were teased with looked so much better. When the Tardis
crashed into the Titanic at the end of ‘The Sound Of Drums’ it was a gloriously
funny moment at the end of what was quite a grim season finale, with David
Tennant back to full energy and life after spending the best part of an hour as
a wisened CGI goblin. There was even a rumour that Kylies character was going
to turn out to be the Tardis in disguise, a little like we got in ‘The Doctor’s
Wife’ (because ‘Astrid’ is an anagram of ‘Tardis’). Instead we get a very awkwardly written Doctor
whose on his own for the first time in a long time (you really miss Martha, who’d
talk some sense into him and help him keep his perspective – something Russell
T picks up on for Donna’s character arc) and who spends most of this story
making promises to people and having to break them and look guilty, while even
Russell’s usual genius at comedy fails (such as the scene where the Doctor
wastes two of his three questions with the robo-angels by accident, something
that’s meant to be Christmas cracker cute, but is one of those supermarket own
brands so garbled in translation you can’t tell if it’s meant to be a joke or a
trivia question. Typical: just when we need Russell T Davies humour we get
Brussell T Sprouts humour). For months we thought we were going to have a
historical Christmas and be on the actual Titanic. Instead we get a story
that’s even gloomier and filled with even more death. There’s enough of an
anticlimax at most Christmasses after all that waiting for it, we don’t need
another one from Dr Who too. This is the equivalent of waiting all year to get
socks. And not pretty Dr Who themed socks either!
‘Voyage Of The Damned’ is, then, a disappointment,
as clichéd a story as the series has ever given us, a badly written strong of
cliches. This was as it happens the first story transmitted after the death of
original Dr Who producer Verity Lambert (there’s a tribute to her at the start
of the credits) but this is everything she’d have hated: lazy, insipid,
hackneyed writing that neither educates nor entertains, that recycles plots
from other places and which goes for cheap emotion at the expense of character.
Ultimately it’s a bunch of loud explosions and some interminably long emotional
scenes without the drama to hold it together or Russell’s usual light touches
of comedy and character to keep us interested. Dr Who as ‘light entertainment’
with a story written around a big name guest star was exactly the sort of thing
John Nathan Turner wanted Dr Who to be but it took the series twenty years to
end up there as the good parts were slowly stripped away for easy ratings and big
casting announcements making up for people running out of ideas. It only took
Russell three. It’s also quite boring, despite all the explosions and set-climbing.
This is also a rare Russell T Davies story that seems longer than it really is
and lasts at least an hour too long – which given that it lasts 75 minutes is a
problem – they everyone had to get special dispensation from the BBC bosses to
clear the schedules for the extra quarter hour. Luckily Russell will learn from
this and put a lot of the things that this story get wrong, right. ‘Midnight’
is a specific riposte to this story, a tale where people don’t just blindly
follow a mysteriously dressed stranger automatically because he says he’ll keep
them safe, where sacrifices actually serve a purpose and where the Doctor learns
he’s not the great messiah but a very naughty boy. That story challenges the
Doctor and the audience in so many ways it didn’t need to – ‘Voyage Of the Damned’
is just 75 minutes of misery watching people die and not particularly caring
about the ones who live. I’d have spent a more enjoyable time drowning.
POSITIVES + David Tennant is so very very good. We see it
in Russell T’s best scripts of course, but spare a thought for just how watchable
he is even in one of Russell’s worst, saying clichéd hackneyed lines as if they’re
full of meaning and looking as moved as he can be when not very much is happening.
A lot of this story uses green-screen to fly in effects later and the
supporting cast offer him almost no help, but he makes every line believable. Nearly.
NEGATIVES –
Never mind the messiah complex of the 10th Doctor or Russell T,
there’s a worst one in town. Murray Gold is at his mot OTT here. A character
feels something? Bring out the choirs as if hits a big emotional moment. A
character dies? Go all out with a bigger orchestra and choir than they had at
the proms. A character quietly reflects? Send in some sweeping strings and a
soprano. It’s all so much and so sickly sweet and it never seems to take a
breath, only adding bad on top of bad, like downing a tin of chocolates after
Christmas lunch has already given you indigestion. Good television music adds
to a feeling we should already be having, as per the best of Murray’s scores. Bad
television music dictates what we think, as per the worst of Murray’s scores
and nowhere more than here. And then they even stop the story a few minutes in
to have a Murray Gold Christmas song! ‘The Stowaway’ is a festive waltz 6/8
time and clearly meant to be ‘Fairtyale of New York’ (as befits the Irish vibe
of the Titanic, where most of the passengers were from) but with aliens.
Mercifully Kylie doesn’t get to sing it (they couldn’t afford it) but it does
seem odd we stop for a song as if this is a musical. This isn’t the Perry Como
Christmas special, what is that song even doing in there? This series is
getting too self-indulgent and full of its own success: other stories suffer
from it, others go on to comment and make amends for it, but none is sunk by it
as badly as this one.
